Dr. David Ford and Dr. Mary Ford, professors of St. Tikhon’s Orthodox Theological Seminary,Ā have written the following for the edification of the faithful. These patterns are patterns emanating from the Kingdom of God – to enter into them is to enter into the mystery of God. At the end there are a collection of quotes from Fr. Alexander Elchaninov about the mystery of marriage. We share these patterns and sayings for the building up of marriage, a sacrament which sustains and blossoms into many blessings for the life of the world. Do everything with loveā¦
In the previous entry in this series, I discussed the idea in Saint John Chrysostomās homilies of marriage as freedom, but as freedom paradoxically defined as mutual service. From this idea of freedom-as-mutual-service, which is the idea of the marriage as a miniature church, we can begin to see how the importance of communion arises. The distinction between unity and communion is a subtle one, but it is important to Saint John and important for our purposes. It consists in the analogous Liturgical difference between the Holy Mysteries of Baptism and of the Eucharist. The processā¦
In the prior essay on marriage and the theme of unity, we explored a bit how Saint John Chrysostom might answer the critics of marriage and family, who level against the institution of marriage the charges that it is too atomising and too alienating. We have seen from Saint Johnās writings that the standard for marriage is that of a complete dissolution of āmineā and āyoursā, even at the level of the body and the breath. But how do we answer the charges we saw before, that marriage and the family are too stifling, too conformist,ā¦
One of the unfortunate genres of opinion writing that has cropped up in this past year, from the left-liberal magazine The Nation to the editorial pages of the centre-right Washington Post, is that the coronavirus has exposed the fundamental faults and flaws of the family unit. The feminist radical Sophie Lewis writes: āthe unfolding of Covid-19 in the United States makes more palpable, among other thingsā¦ that the familyāas the property logic and mode of social reproduction central to capitalismāis killing us.ā A month and a half before this, the capitalist Harvard professor Ian Marcus Corbinā¦
